I'm requisitioing some tools for a large scale web development project.

Intending to start with the following:

JIRA for issues tracking, wiki, git or svn hosting

Greenhopper plugin for agile PM

Bonfire for issue creation

Why JIRA? It's something myself and core team members are experienced in already and seems to be able to centralize most of our needed project tools under one platform.

I'm unfamiliar with Confluence though, Is it mainly to give an area for the business side to create multiple projects, discussions, etc? Would JIRA combined with Google Apps be the common alternative for JIRA

Atlassian's Bamboo looks to serve the purpose of automating deployments, does this integrate with JIRA's hosted svcs so that a commit can trigger a staging/production deployment with testings and reports and auto rollbacks on failures?

I believe the above JIRA and modules will be enough to start this project. Crucible looks to make code review less painful.

Does Fisheye offer much more over the built in JIRA source code browsers?

Wouldn't be better to think of what are you going to do on the project and then fit the tools in? Tools are supposed to solve problems / assist management, but - as per the question as it stands now - it seems that the problems and management actions aren't clear enough...
– Tiago Cardoso♦Oct 9 '12 at 19:48

Thanks Tiago, I think you got it right. I was clutching at tools prematurely. Though I needed something to start loading up with tickets and refine as I go, I'll take a step back today and separate from the requirements from the technologies.
– ljs.devOct 9 '12 at 23:58

Appreciate that, Leon. I went a little beyond my initial comment, with some further thoughts.
– Tiago Cardoso♦Oct 10 '12 at 0:25

2 Answers
2

Wouldn't be better to think of what are you going to do on the project and then fit the tools in? Tools are supposed to solve problems / assist management, but - as per the question as it stands now - it seems that the problems and management actions aren't clear enough...

So, considering 'management' as keep the communication flowing (it goes beyond this, but let's be a little simplistic), you can think, for instance, of what is the information you need to provide to whom and how often.

Besides, think of the cycles you'll have in your project, not only the development itself.

Discuss with your team about the tools they're used to use. There's nothing more frustrating than fight for an amazing tool that no one cares to use (like Jira, for instance... that's quite expensive). It seems to not be a problem as you're team is already used to it. Anyways...

In the end, if you're comfortable, with a clear picture of what you need, these tools will only make you reach your objectives faster / easier, but they're not something you must rely on for your success.

Sometimes, we're tempted to rely on 'tools' or 'gadgets' to reach a goal, but maybe if something goes wrong, you'll want to blame the software. And there's nothing more wrong than that.

Confluence is Atlassian's business enterprise wiki. Your company can use this to document procedures. For example, if you want everyone to complete task A in the same 10 steps, you'll want to create a page here to document Task A and its 10 steps so everyone is completing it the same way.

Usually, different departments have their own sandbox to play in, and they may or may not be interconnected. I've worked at companies where everyone has access to all other departments in the wiki, but I've also worked at less transparent places were each department can only see what they've been given permissions for.